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Rye Gems
1⅔ cups rye flour 1¼ cup molasses 1⅓ cups flour 1/4 cups milk 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, add molasses, milk, eggs well beaten, and butter. Bake in hot oven in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes.
A plain rye muffin sweetened with molasses. The printed ingredient list has suffered in transcription, so read the quantities carefully before mixing.
- The milk measurementThe rye flour quantity was checked against the printed page and reads as our text now gives it. But "1/4 cups milk" is too little liquid for three cups of flour and two eggs, and is likely 1¼ cups. Adjust by feel: the batter should drop thickly from a spoon, not pour.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin, made in various sizes, commonly of eight to twelve cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use cast iron, heating and buttering it before the batter goes in gives the best result, though the recipe as printed asks only that the pans be buttered.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At that heat check at 20 minutes rather than trusting the full twenty-five; rye browns quickly and molasses browns faster still.
- Rye flourUse light or medium rye. Dark or whole rye and pumpernickel meal are much thirstier and heavier than the flour a nineteenth-century grocer sold as "rye flour," and will give a dense, damp crumb.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons suits the single-acting powders of the period. With modern double-acting powder, 2½ to 3 teaspoons for three cups of total flour is enough, and less leaves no metallic aftertaste.
- MixingRye has little gluten but plenty of pentosan gum, and the batter turns sticky and slack if worked. Stir only until the dry flour disappears.
- YieldAbout twelve gems. Best warm the day they are baked, split and buttered; rye keeps moist but the crust softens by the second day.
Gems are associated with the gem pan, the heavy cast-iron muffin tin sold widely in nineteenth-century America and often heated empty on the range so the batter set the moment it landed; whether the cakes took their name from the pan or the pan from the cakes is not settled. Fannie Farmer's book has them -- graham gems are well attested -- in an era when the "breakfast cake" was expected on the table hot, and quick chemical leavening had made that possible without yeast set the night before. Rye and molasses together were a New England habit of long standing, the same pairing that produced brown bread, and rye flour remained cheap and common in the region long after white wheat flour had become the standard for fine baking.